After using Alpine Linux for several years, i recently started Factorio which required an Glibc environment to run. So i bought some random laptop from eBay and installed Linux Mint on it.
The laptop turned out to be pretty lightweight and of long battery lifetime, so it quickly became my favourite to take with me when on adventures. Originally, i kept using the default Mate Desktop session. I had been an i3 window manager user for quite some years, but i thought i should give the defaults a try.
The touchpad was not as comfortable as a real mouse, so soon, i went back to i3. But thats where the trouble began.
When starting to play music via mpv and closing the lid, the machine would go into suspend despite having it disabled in the power settings (from Mate). The music would stop. Even worse, i could not identify which process from the process list was telling the kernel to suspend.
Knowing that the suspend is triggered by writing a string to /sys/power/state, i made a fifo with mkfifo asdf and boldly bind mounted it over the entry in sysfs: mount --bind asdf /sys/power/state. Closing the lid, waiting for a few seconds, then checked the journal:
Jun 08 04:44:55 a114 systemd[1]: systemd-logind.service: Watchdog timeout (limit 3min)! Jun 08 04:44:55 a114 systemd[1]: systemd-logind.service: Killing process 640 (systemd-logind) with signal SIGABRT.
Culprit found. Now that i had the name, i could check the manpages:
/etc/systemd/logind.conf allowed me to configure this behavior away, so that problem was solved.
I was annoyed that, in order to prevent my machine from disrupting my usage of it, i had to chase after and disable behavior that others built in intentionally. This was in 2024.
I had an Acer Aspire laptop. This was my second laptop and the first one bought from my own money. I had been an Ubuntu user for some years, using the default desktop environment GNOME 2. I really enjoyed the smoothness of Linux over my previous experiences with Windows Vista.
Because of a messed up dist-upgrade i reinstalled my system with a fresh Ubuntu. It ended up installing a desktop environment that i did not knew - the UI was at unusual places and i had trouble finding my programs. But that was something i could learn to live with. But there was another problem. From time to time i would come back into my room and find the laptop in some delirious state - running, the screen being black. Not responding to network activity. A reset was required and my data from running programs lost.
Also the logs on disk did not show anything interesting - they just stopped. No way for me to debug this issue. As i was a student and had to deliver some documents in time, this was a big risk for me.
Believing that Ubuntu did not properly support my machine, i started distro hopping. As i was not a big fan of systemd, i went for Void Linux, which had freshly abandoned systemd. Suddenly, i had to set up my desktop environment myself. The new GNOME thing didn't seem worth the effort as it was too complex for me to get working. I had seen a lecturer use the i3 window manager, so i went for i3. After some weeks i had my i3 config worked out. Later i moved to the musl flavour of Void, later Alpine Linux. I was quite satisfied with that setup and started tracking my config files in git.
Some readers might already have figured out what happened. The Linux kernel could not suspend my Acer Aspire. Not knowing about the logind behavior and not being able to turn it off, mainstream Linux has been broken for me starting around 2015.